Connect

> Simplicitate

Encompasses the technologies and practices used to connect people, places, and things. Connect looks for things like information technology, urban design, and language.

The Implications of Self-Driving Cars for Real Estate. Automate the Freight: Drone Medical Deliveries. How the Robot Revolution will Change how we See, Feel, & Talk. Smart City Living Transforms the Urban Landscape - MIT Technology Review. With 10,000 people per day migrating to the world’s urban areas, cities everywhere are seeking ways to transform their increasingly congested landscapes into safer, smarter, and healthier environments that better serve their residents.

This historic population shift is driving an ongoing global movement toward smart, connected cities where secure networks link everything from office buildings to transportation infrastructures, and intelligent data-management foundations are buoyed by the Internet of Things (IoT). Just as the digital age has transformed business and consumer lifestyles, smart cities promise to dramatically alter how public services such as education, health care, and entertainment are delivered, enhancing residents’ quality of life and supporting sustainable urbanization.

At the same time, smart cities can be a trigger for significant economic growth by improving city management, creating new revenue opportunities, and driving efficiencies that result in cost savings.
No Satellites Needed for Next-Gen Navigation System. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a great navigation aid – unless you lose the signal while negotiating a complicated spaghetti junction.

That's bad enough for conventional cars, but for autonomous vehicles it could be catastrophic, so the University of California, Riverside's Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory under Zak Kassas is developing an alternative navigation system that uses secondary radio signals, such as from cell phone systems and Wi-Fi to either complement existing GPS-based systems or as a standalone alternative that is claimed to be highly reliable, consistent, and tamper-proof.

Urban Development may take New Direction as AV's hit the Road. Emotional AI Enables Computers to Read Our Moods. Emotions critically influence all aspects of our lives, from how we live, work, learn and play, to the decisions we make, big and small.

Emotions drive how we communicate and connect with each other, and impact our health and well-being. Human emotional intelligence (or your EQ) is our ability to recognize not only our own emotions but also those of other people, and to use emotions to guide our behaviour, adapt to different environments and achieve our goals. Humans with high EQ lead more successful professional and personal lives – they are more likable and more persuasive, tend to be more effective leaders, and generally lead healthier, happier and even longer lives. Today, our lives play out in a digital world. We are surrounded by lots of hyper-connected systems, smart devices and advanced AI (artificial intelligence) systems.

The War on the Disturbingly Real VR Trolls. I felt awkward when Katie Kelly, a slim woman in a turquoise sweater, stepped closer.

Despite the crackling campfire, this was a professional meeting, and she had intruded on my personal space. “Around here it starts to feel a little bit too uncomfortable,” said Kelly, looking up at the white humanoid robot that was my own body. Kelly was gently demonstrating why she and others at social virtual-reality startup AltSpaceVR have been working on ways to give people more control of their virtual personal space. Industry leaders such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg say that virtual reality must become a place we can socialize if the medium is to become widely popular.

An AI Ally to Combat Bullying in Virtual Worlds. In any fictionalized universe, the distinction between playful antagonism and earnest harassment can be difficult to discern.

Name-calling between friends playing a video game together is often a form of camaraderie.
What next for blockchain?
The conversation around blockchain is changing.

We’re only now starting to understand this technology’s full potential, says one executive. Bitcoin isn’t mainstream yet, and some skepticism of the digital currency remains. But the buzz surrounding the technology underlying it—blockchains—has started to take a different tone. Blockchain, headquartered in Luxembourg, is a company that provides a software platform for digital assets.
Social Network Access Unlocked Through Clothes?
New York based Rochambeau (French for the popular game rock-paper-scissors) has effortlessly given birth to a handsome jacket.

Merging their shared passions of art and design, they have creatively sprinkled some technology to their one-of-a-kind creation, the Rochanbeau BRIGHT BMBR smart jacket. #BornDigital, Rochanbeau’s smart jacket was manufactured with serialized smart labels, tags and added software capabilities which makes the jacket more intelligent and more interactive. Stitched into the fabric of the physical product, the born digital perks ensure that each limited edition Rochambeau BRIGHT BMBR jacket offers the wearer unique digital content and cultural experiences of the VIP variety.

How Uber is Prototyping a Shared Solution for Global Transportation. Traffic, the bane of every commuters existence.

Throw in the rising cost of oil, worsening air pollution, unbridled road rage and the arguments in favor of ride-sharing stack up. Tech titans like Uber, Lyft and China-based Didi Chuxing have helped decrease rates of vehicle ownership but until recently, hadn’t moved the needle on space-efficient travel.
1st Direct Counterfactual Quantum Comms Achieved. Quantum communication is a strange beast, but one of the weirdest proposed forms of it is called counterfactual communication - a type of quantum communication where no particles travel between two recipients.

Theoretical physicists have long proposed that such a form of communication would be possible, but now, for the first time, researchers have been able to experimentally achieve it - transferring a black and white bitmap image from one location to another without sending any physical particles. If that sounds a little too out-there for you, don't worry, this is quantum mechanics, after all. It's meant to be complicated.

But once you break it down, counterfactual quantum communication actually isn't as bizarre as it sounds.
The Future of Flying Cars: Science Fact or Science Fiction?
Uber has shaken up the taxi industry and is trying to put driverless cars on our roads.

Now the company aims to have flying ride-sharing vehicles in our skies by 2020. Uber is not alone in working towards flying cars.
The Mixed Reality Revolution is here, and it’ll change your world forever. The past 30 years have set the stage for technological and cultural change at an unprecedented scale. The rise of Personal Computing, Internet as well as Smartphones have completely redefined the way we interact with our world as well as each other — today, over 99.9% of the world’s data is stored digitally and half of the world’s’ population is already part of the internet, a figure which is expected to reach closer to 100% by 2020. Every day we’ve been growing more reliant on modern technology as we collectively craft a separate digital universe of information byte by byte — a universe we use to manage everything in our lives from money to our closest social circles.

Will China’s 'One Belt, One Road' Reshape Global Trade?
One of the biggest stories in Asian business is China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, an economic and diplomatic program that could transform trade. The future of trade in Asia could depend heavily on what becomes of China’s expansive One Belt, One Road initiative, which calls for massive investment in and development of trade routes in the region. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, recorded in May, McKinsey senior partners Joe Ngai and Kevin Sneader talk with Cecilia Ma Zecha about One Belt, One Road—what it really means, what it needs to become a reality, and why people should take it seriously. Podcast transcript Cecilia Ma Zecha: Hello, and welcome to this edition of the McKinsey Podcast.

I’m Cecilia Ma Zecha, an editor with McKinsey Publishing, based in Singapore. Audio. Death Technology Allows the Living to Speak to Deceased. Imagine you have a close friend you frequently communicate with via text.
Germany's Crowd-Sourced Locomore Train. Bitcoin Could Be More Important Than the Internet. The Future is Now…& it's Called Sarah!
Sitting on an early morning flight recently I overheard a fascinating conversation between the two gentlemen sitting next to me.
NASA Validates EmDrive: A Revolution for the Aerospace Industry?
Roger Shawyer, the British scientist who invented the highly controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology called EmDrive, has said Nasa's work is encouraging but still far behind many private firms working on it already.

Peak Car Ownership Near. A Columbia University study suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City – passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile. Such convenience and low cost will make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis – the ‘transportation cloud’ – will quickly become dominant form of transportation – displacing far more than just car ownership, it will take the majority of users away from public transportation as well.
What if the internet stopped working for a day?

How Far Can We Get Without Flying?
I’m a climate scientist who doesn’t fly.
Momentum Growing for Future Hypersonic Flight. MOJAVE, California — The world is at the start of a renaissance in supersonic and hypersonic flight that will transform aviation, but the effort will need steady commitment and funding if the United States wants to lead the way, congressional leaders and industry officials said at a forum late last month.
How blockchain can change the future of IoT. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing industry destined to transform homes, cities, farms, factories, and practically everything else by making them smart and more efficient. According to Gartner, by 2020, there will be more than 20 billion connected things across the globe, powering a market that will be worth north of $3 trillion.

How AI & HI Are Combined Will Define Humanity’s Future. Are Chatbots the Future of Banking (...& Customer Service)?
Global Auto & ICT Vendors Form Cross-Industry 5G Group. VR Project Lets Users See Life as a Doomed Cow or Piece of Coral. Reusable Takeaway Smart Cup is Arrives in Melbourne Cafes. Rise of the Robots. Long Short Term Memory & the Future of AI. Apple Discussing Support of AR Contact Lens With iOS. The Super Simple & Cheap Car of the Future. Elon Musk Advocates ‘Neural Lace’ So We Can Become Cyborgs. Driverless Trucks Are Coming, & Millions Of Jobs Will Be Automated. The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup. With AR, You Can Use Your Arm As A Keypad. Unlocking Computers With Brain Signals Instead of Passwords. Profusa Awarded $7.5M To Develop Implantable Biosensors. Amazon & the CIA Want to Teach AI to Watch from Space. The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 2.